One man in his time plays many animals. Hardie at this period turned mole. He burrowed darkling into _oes alienum._ There is often one of these sleek miners in a bank: it is a section of human zoology the journals have lately enlarged on, and drawn the painstaking creature grubbing and mining away to brief opulence--and briefer penal servitude than one could wish. I rely on my reader having read these really able sketches of my contemporaries, and spare him minute details, that possess scarcely a new feature, except one: in that bank was not only a mole, but a mole-catcher; and, contrary to custom, the mole was the master, the mole-catcher the servant. The latter had no hostile views; far from it: he was rather attached to his master. But his attention was roused by the youngest clerk, a boy of sixteen, being so often sent for into the bank parlour, to copy into the books some arithmetical result, without its process. Attention soon became suspicion; and suspicion found many little things to feed on, till it grew to certainty. But the outer world was none the wiser: the mole-catcher was no chatterbox; he was a solitary man--no wife nor mistress about him; and he revered the mole, and liked him better than anything in the world--_except money._ Thus the great banker stood, a colossus of wealth and stability to the eye, though ready to crumble at a touch; and indeed self-doomed, for bankruptcy was now his game. This was a miserable man, far more miserable than his son, whose happiness he had thwarted: his face was furrowed and his hair thinned by a secret struggle; and of all the things that gnawed him, like the fox, beneath his Spartan robe, none was more bitter than to have borrowed five thousand pounds of his children and sunk it. His wife's father, a keen man of business, who saw there was little affection on his side, had settled his daughter's money on her for life, and in case of her death, on the children upon coming of age. The marriage of Alfred or Jane would be sure to expose him; settlements would be proposed; lawyers engaged to peer into the trust, &c. No; they _must_ remain single for the present, or else marry wealth. So, when his son announced an attachment to a young lady living in a suburban villa, it was a terrible blow, though he took it with outward calm, as usual. But if, instead of prating about beauty, virtue, and breeding, Alfred had told him hard cash in five figures could be settled by the bride's family on the young couple, he would have welcomed the wedding with great external indifference, but a secret gush of joy; for then he could throw himself on Alfred's generosity, and be released from that one corroding debt; perhaps allowed to go on drawing the interest of the remainder.